Baltimore Heritage

Before the early 1900s, families in Baltimore never had to tell a kid to “watch out for cars”. However, as the number of cars in the city grew during the early 20th century, playing in the street became increasingly dangerous and even illegal. Criminalizing children at play has a long history in Baltimore from complaints in the Sun about young “baseball maniacs” breaking windows in the 1870s to a 1898 police order designed to “disperse” children from gathering on newly “smoothly paved streets to play.” In 1910, the Children’s Playground Association of Baltimore formed a “Guild of Play” to host supervised street play at locations around the city and started working to keep children safe through building more playgrounds. Despite their efforts and others, more than one in three East Baltimore youth surveyed in 2017 said they didn’t have or didn’t know of any safe place to play in their neighborhood.

What started out as a volunteer effort to clean up trash on Canton's waterfront led Dr. Raymond Bahr on a path of research that has brought to light where Frederick Douglass escaped from his enslavement, how the Canton Company shaped Baltimore, and the national impact that Canton's industries had on the growth of America. Join Dr. Bahr as he shares his research and findings on this under-told part of our history